No One Mourns the Dickersons

June 22, 2010 2:44 pm

Friday night, Kyle and I went into the city to see…WickedTheMusicalYes! I was so excited. I’ve been in love with this music for years, and we’d talked about going to see it. Then we discovered it was leaving San Francisco in September. Then Kyle found half-price tickets (still really good seats, though!), so we bought some!

We looked into taking public transit, but it would’ve required 49 transfers (okay, that’s an exaggeration) and 3 hours (that’s actually not) to get there. It also would’ve been more expensive, so we just drove. Tons more convenient, cheaper, and it only took an hour. The only hitch was the toll to get over the bridge: we got confused by the poor signage and switched into the carpool lane, which, it turns out, meant we didn’t have to pay a toll. (This all happened very quickly.) But then we realized at the last minute that for that bridge, “carpool” means 3 people, not two. So Kyle later did some research, found out that to avoid a fine, we could just send in our $4 toll, and did so.

We eventually made it downtown and to the Orpheum Theatre, though. In our attempts to allow for traffic and finding parking and picking up our tickets and whatnot, however, we were super early. So we walked around a little bit, but not too much, because the neighborhood is a little bit sketchy. But we finally got in and seated and the show started…eep!

For those utterly unfamiliar with this musical, it’s the story of the witches of Oz. Y’know, pre-Dorothy. That’s all I’m gonna say ‘cuz I’m not really interested in writing a synopsis, but there’s a lot to think about in it. And the music’s to die for, and it’s hilarious and touching and a whole lot of fun. (I was laughing so hard during “Popular” that I had tears streaming down my face!) I enjoyed seeing it performed, as well as getting plot holes filled in. The performance was wonderful, and I had a great time. Kyle says he enjoyed it, too. When asked, he said his favorite part was the sets. [rolls eyes] I dunno what his deal is.

So then we came home. And despite what the GPS thought, we were not, at any time, submerged in the Bay.

Because somehow that makes a difference

June 15, 2010 5:27 pm

We were sitting on the couch reading this evening when there was a knock at the door.

I got up to answer it to find a representative from the Democratic Party. Having taken my name from the list of registered voters (upon which I’m registered as an independent, not to be confused with the American Independent party), which apparently, in California is recorded as “decline to state”. It would seem the assumption in California is that everyone is really part of a party, but some people just don’t like to say so publicly, so you get registered as “decline to state”.

Anyway, this representative from the Democratic Party just wanted to see if he could change my registration to be a Democrat if I didn’t mind. I don’t really see why this matters much, but after declining his offer to change my party he proceeded to tell me about the Republican candidate for governor, Meg Whitman, who was apparently not going to be good but not for any specific reason.

After rambling on for a bit I interrupted to again state I wasn’t interested in changing my party affiliation.

The funny part is, he left and I still know nothing about the Democratic candidate or any reason why I should vote for him or her, but I do know that the Republican candidate is Meg Whitman. I have a tip for the Democrats, that’s not great marketing. You had someone at my door talking to me and didn’t give me a single reason to vote for your candidate or even drop the name of your candidate. Instead you gave some vague generalities about how the other candidate was going to be bad but didn’t actually give any reasons why she’d be bad.

Not effective campaigning, at least to me. If anything you made me annoyed that your platform is apparently “the other candidate is bad.”

Happy Birthday to Me

June 12, 2010 9:56 pm

Wednesday was my birthday. It started out with an exciting day at work where I fixed bugs and watched Google lectures on Map Reduce.

I get to come home for lunch which is nice and when I came in the door I discovered Jess had decorated for me!IMGP2471

After work I went and used the gift certificate Jess gave me at Christmas for a massage. My shoulders and lower-back had been rather tweaked so getting those knots worked out was rather nice.

Then I went home and waited around for Jess to get home from cub scouts so we could go to dinner. We went to Black Angus steakhouse in Dublin which was pretty good. They sang a birthday song and brought a giant cookie-ma-jig which was very tasty.

Jess made me a lovely chocolate with chocolate frosting cake:IMGP2472After dinner I blew out candles, but we were both too full to eat any cake.

IMGP2477Jess ordered me a really nice frame to put my diplomas in. They’ve just been sitting in a box ever since I got them and I’ve been wanting to do something with them. So we put them in the frame and I took it to work and put it in my office which is nice. It’s almost like I’m a professional!

IMGP2497Thanks for all the birthday wishes and gifts. One year ago was a very different time. I was still in Provo, unmarried, still in grad school. Quite a change in my life from 24 to 25. It’s been a great year, here’s to another for 25 to 26.

Migrating from Songbird to Rhythmbox

June 4, 2010 4:40 pm

Once upon a time a company created Songbird. A music player designed to supplant all other music players and have Linux compatibility with iPod support. So we set Jess up with it and she started using it to organize and play her music. And it was good.

Mostly.

Turned out that the iPod support was flaky at best, but they were supposedly working on it. Then Songbird announced that they were dropping iPod support. A few months went by and then Songbird announced they were dropping Linux support. So now they’re just another music player in a sea of existing and mature players with nothing much to distinguish them from the rest.

So lacking iPod support and getting no further updates for the Linux version we needed a new solution for Jess’ music needs. However, she’d already gone through all the hassle of getting her music library setup just right in Songbird with all her ratings and playcounts and playlists. Since she has several thousand songs she didn’t want to try to redo all that by hand.

Being the master of computer science that I am I decided to take it upon myself to figure out how to automagically migrate her music out of Songbird and in to Rhythmbox. (When combined with Gtkpod these 2 make an acceptable and working solution for music management and iPod syncing.)

Unfortunately, for unknown reasons neither system used any kind of normal standard for storing their data. Well, that’s not entirely true. Most of the data is just fine. But file location data was a mess. Songbird stored it in some weird convoluted ascii encoding of unicode. Rhythmbox stores it in some randomly/partially url-encoded form of unicode. But lacking any clear documentation on the matter I had to reverse-engineer both formats. It was a pain.

But I did it! And now for your benefit I present my automagic music migrator to get you successfully and as painlessly as possible from Songbird to Rhythmbox.

I’m hosting this project on Github: http://github.com/kdickerson/Export-from-Songbird

Download the file songbird_to_rhythmbox.py file and then run it:

#python songbird_to_rhythmbox.py

or make it executable and run it:

#chmod +x songbird_to_rhythmbox.py
#./songbird_to_rhythmbox.py

It will ask you 2 questions. 1. What user you’d like to migrate (the default is the current user, so most people will just hit enter). and 2. If you would like the script to overwrite your existing rhythmbox library or just output the migration to a new file for you.

I wrote and used the script with Python 2.6.5

What this script WON’T do:
It won’t migrate playlists. Jess already had an export function for playlists in Songbird and exporting the playlists as M3Us and then importing to the migrated Rhythmbox worked with only a very small percentage of errors for files with special characters.

I thought about spending the time to automate migrating playlists, but I don’t feel like it. Rhythmbox stores playlists in another xml file and Songbird stores them in the same database as the other data, so you can use my script as a guide to write your own playlist migrator if you’d like.